ABSTRACT
Imagine one has the rare fortune of watching a cheetah stalking its prey—say an antelope—and then, instantly, breaking into an “all-out” run, which over a short course brings down the antelope in a spectacular life-or-death capture. What one witnesses is a quintessential expression of impressively well-orchestrated physiology. Adaptive evolutionary processes have resulted in a well-integrated suite of functions involving cardiorespiratory transport, metabolic energy production, and nervous coordination of visual and tactile stimuli resulting in rapid and precise muscle activations producing the spectacular behavior.
